In Regret, Always
by Igenlode Wordsmith
Summary: Eight years ago, Raoul left a letter for his wife, took Gustave, and set off to leave Coney Island. Now, as the clouds of war hang over France, the echoes of that night still haunt them all.
1. The final wrong

**Ch1: The final wrong**

It was still cold in this first spring of the war, despite the afternoon sun, and a bitter wind crept over the Paris rooftops and rattled the long shutters of the Hôtel de Chagny. There was a fire in the grate of the Vicomte's study, as if to banish for a few final hours the memories of months of rain and freezing mud, and from the mantel above there came the sleepy ticking of the clock; but from time to time, as his pen paused for a moment in its steady travel across the page, the gusts outside seemed to hold the echo of great guns in Champagne and the Ardennes.

Raoul's face held lines of strain now in addition to the bitter marks that belied his age, and the bright uniform of scarlet and sky-blue that had served France so well in parades and regimental balls had been discarded for the drab blue of this new way of fighting. Every so often, in an unconscious gesture, he would reach up to run two fingers round the inside of his collar. The uniform tunic was trim enough, but it had begun to hang a little loose on his frame, and there were hollows under his eyes that eight days' leave had done nothing to redress.

The pen paused, dipped, moved wearily on. Brief replies, apologies, invitations declined; Raoul sighed, with a glance at the clock, folded another sheet, scrawled a hasty superscription, blotted it, and thrust the pile aside. One hand reached automatically for the decanter on the corner of the desk. It was empty.

Kept empty, on his orders. Raoul's mouth twisted a little at his own expense. There was brandy downstairs. He could ring to have it brought up. But most days, second thoughts were enough.

With the ghosts of the past heavy about the white-and-gilt panelling, with the last of his leave ticking inexorably away into the knowledge of what lay ahead, he allowed himself to consider the possibility. Fought old battles all over again in grim, thankless silence, and set the empty decanter gently back onto its tray with a soft click of glass, breathing a little harder than before.

There had been a Boldini portrait over the mantelpiece once, an exquisite, delicate thing he'd had commissioned in the first year of his marriage. The artist had painted Christine in costume as Juliet, shown gazing wistfully from her balcony against a fanciful garden that was at one and the same time clearly a stage backdrop and a scene from a childhood fairy tale. Her lips had been a little parted, as if on the verge of speech, and Boldini had caught that fugitive wondering expression in her eyes. The likeness had been breathtakingly beautiful.

When he'd hung it there to gaze down on him from the wall, he'd still believed that shy look was a smile surprised by love. In the years that followed — as it had yielded on his wife's face more and more often to a look of shuttered unhappiness — he'd come at last to understand the portrait's gaze as one of silent accusation.

It was gone now; banished at first to her empty rooms, then gone with so much else of hers, in those years after Coney Island when he'd tried to staunch an open wound with memory and then to cauterise it with obliteration. It made no odds either way. A faint unfaded shadow still clung to the panelling like a ghost where the frame had hung, and that look of reproach still haunted his dreams.

Raoul straightened the glasses on the tray beside the decanter, slowly. Under one there was a dead spider, pathetic and dried. The room had stood unused for months, and there was a war on.

The shutters rattled again sharply against the wind outside, and he thrust back his chair as if to stand; then subsided, yielding the impulse to a tacit, unspoken defeat. Presently he drew up his seat closer to the desk once more, laid a fresh sheet of paper down on the blotter, dipped his pen and wiped it meticulously over and over against the rim of the inkwell, a tiny soft chinking sound against the glass. Embers shifted in the fire with a fall of ash, and Raoul reached up unthinking with his free hand to ease his collar, staring down. But whatever he saw, it was not the blank page in front of him.

* * *

Alone with Gustave in a hire-carriage, with the gates of Phantasma falling further and further behind them. Phantasma... the stage... Christine.

 _My dearest wife— my dearest—_

Round and round in his head to the jostling beat of the horse's hooves, words jolting together until they no longer make any sense.

 _Little Lotte, I beg you, forgive me—_

She will have found that letter by now. Perhaps she is reading it at this minute, her hands touching the page where his had lingered for those few final instants before he left the room.

Left the room. Left Phantasma. Left her behind; kept his word. But it was not for that that he had done it.

For a moment he can see her face as she begins to understand, vivid distress ebbing to disillusionment and shock. Then his mind's eye shows him that mocking white mask at her shoulder, insinuating, leaning close, and his hands clench at his sides.

Let _him_ explain, then. Let her Angel of Music talk his way out of this one... if he can.

 _I beg you, forgive me—_

A groan escapes him; he bites down on it, manages a smile for Gustave in the half-dusk. The carriage windows are grimy, and the boy's face is a pale, averted oval in the corner, glimpsed in flickered profile as each street-lamp passes. He has fallen mercifully silent, pulling at a split in the squabs beside him where the seat upholstery is worn and frayed. The small fingers move convulsively, over and over again.

Raoul draws breath to reprimand him. Feels it catch in his throat, and reaches out to pull the boy suddenly, fiercely against him instead. Gustave buries his face in his father's coat, clinging tightly in response, and Raoul holds him close, trying to stave off the agony of loss.

Just the two of them now. Christine — oh God, Christine.

He has told Gustave she will be coming soon. She'll meet them on the ship... or maybe she'll have to stay behind a few days, he doesn't know for sure. She has to sing, you know, Gustave, it's very important to her; evasions, half-truths, lies, he rehearsed them all on that endless walk from the dressing-room to find his son. Anything to forestall the tears and the explanations that will have to come.

The backs of his hands still smart from the marks of Meg Giry's nails where he'd dragged the boy out of her grasp. She'd been taking Gustave out of the building when he found them, the child looking unhappy and hanging back; Raoul has no idea what she thought she was doing, but she'd flown at him incoherently, half-hysterical, telling him he had no rights to the boy— that everyone knew—

From all he could make out it was the same sick fantasy he'd heard last night from _him_. The same possessive jealousy; he'd seen the way Meg looked at his wife, seen the envy for Christine's poise and position, and the family security a showgirl like her could never know.

He caught at her wrists and tore her loose as she clawed at him, and left her sobbing on the floor as if her heart would break. He isn't proud of it. But he'd thought the Girys were his allies, she and her mother, thought they'd understood back there in Paris where the real threat was and where the route to sanity lay, and to meet them again in America working against his wife — courting the favours of their common enemy — was one more tawdry blow to the story he has been telling himself for so long. The myth of heroism, rescue, and the perfect marriage.

Raoul holds Gustave in the stale-smelling darkness of the hire-carriage, feeling the tremor in the boy's desperate clutch, and imagines that ugly rumour running round Phantasma, slow-moving fury building helpless within him at the thought. Is that what they all see when they look at him, then? His wife — his shy, modest, strait-laced wife — writhing in libidinous lust beneath another man, overcome by sensuous pleasure... another token triumph for the Master of Phantasma? Isn't it enough to have tricked her here and ensnared her free-will and her happiness in a cloud of illusion without smearing her name?

Only — the thought comes like a leaden balloon, puncturing all the self-righteous comfort of his anger — that's exactly what he, Raoul, has just done. He has put her there. Pushed her into the Phantom's bed. And if there are to be any further children —an old pain long denied— then they will be of the other man's get.

He had made an unforgivable mistake and he is making his penance. One way or another, he _chose_ this...

His own words, haunting him, are irrevocable now; a confession he cannot take back.

 _Now I must go, our choices are made—_

He gave her everything, in those first years, he tells himself stubbornly. He wasn't ashamed of her or her music — she was an artiste, a great performer, and he wanted the world to know it. He took her all round Europe, from England to the farthest reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and everywhere she sang she was showered with praise. And when their first child began to show he took her home and cherished her, wrapping her in every luxury that love could provide. He had watched her ripen and bloom, as a singer and as a woman. And when the baby was born — after two days of long hard labour that left her white and drained, and frightened him more than he cared to admit — he took the two of them down to Nice with a nursemaid to care for the child so that she could recover.

But after Gustave... things were never quite the same. He knew how much music meant to her; tried to comfort her when she fretted that since the baby she could no longer sing, that her voice had changed. Her body was her instrument, and a singer's voice was a thing almost outside herself, he knew that, and never laughed at the care she took over wrapping her slender throat against a cold wind, or ordering up the lightest and most nourishing foods from the kitchen to keep the glow in her cheeks and the strength in her firm young flesh.

To Raoul, once the strain of the birth was over, her voice sounded as golden as ever. But he took her fears seriously, engaged a professor so that she could study again, and waited through the long months until she felt she was once more fit to perform. When she told him shyly she wanted no more children — not yet at least, not for a few years, not until she was ready to leave the stage — he gave her that, too, without a moment of dissent. They had Gustave, after all... and in those forty-eight hours of convulsive struggle, banished from her side while she fought pains that racked her without issue, he had understood all too clearly what he might have lost.

Only— it hurt to be treated as if he could not control himself. To see his wife start to stiffen and hold back from the most casual of caresses, as if he were some ravening drunken beast who would encroach upon the slightest encouragement. He'd married an artiste, yes, and he was proud of her; but he'd married a woman, a loving vital creature he could wrap in his arms to murmur nonsense into her hair, and all that was left to him was a doll held rigid by her own sense of honour.

"But... it's not fair on you if I seem to _suggest_ things," she had protested in distress, the one time he tried to explain how he felt. And Raoul, his own face flaming, had not been able to find a way to make her understand that frustration was nothing when placed beside the everyday intimacy they had lost. That he would rather hold her close in the knowledge that was all he could have than be stranded in this polite alienated void.

He watched her learn to take delight in Gustave, covering the little boy with kisses. Knew that the two of them shared something from which he was utterly shut out.

Things at home grew strained and distant, and when his cousin Rodolphe de Sessaies invited him on a pleasure-party to Monte Carlo, it was Christine herself who encouraged him to go.

He'd always liked Rodolphe, he remembers now, and in the sunshine of the South and the company of the boy's carefree young friends the world seemed a brighter place. Christine back in Paris seemed somehow closer to him than Christine near at hand but holding him remote; he forgot his unhappiness, remembered only that he loved her, and sent home a string of cheerful tongue-in-cheek letters poking fun at the sights of the town. With Rodolphe and the rest he took the air on the cliff-tops and mocked gently from a café table at the aging exquisites who paraded the boulevards in the fashions of their youth. He and the others inscribed their names and titles in the book at the casino, admired the adjoining opera hall — own cousin to the Opéra at Paris and resplendent in equal marble glories — gambled a little, laughed a lot, and caused a degree of general disturbance that won them frowns from gamesters in the inner rooms and indulgent smiles among certain dowagers of a sentimental habit.

On the final evening, amid shared hilarity, Raoul staked his pocket-watch against the pearl necklet of Rodolphe's pretty partner at the tables, won, and carried off the trinket in his pocket to present to Christine on their return home. But it was the shy, sunburnt smile that went with it that sent Christine headlong into his arms.

Things were better between them after that, in some ways at least. When Rodolphe asked him again, he went without a second thought. And again.

Only his cousin's friends were older now, the gaming more serious, and he began to lose, a little at first and then more heavily. He was a rich man, after all, richer than Rodolphe; he could afford to weather a run of bad luck. Or two.

When his cousin, uneasy now, tried to warn him off, Raoul took it badly. And when he discovered Rodolphe had been talking to Christine — with all the resulting tears, pleas, and unspoken recriminations — then that was the outside of enough. For both of them.

Raoul watches the lights of Coney Island flicker past, and remembers, in excruciating detail, the years that followed, and his own ruinous folly. Folly that has brought him here to this road, with the ashes of his marriage receding further and further behind him...

Gustave raises a pale face and asks, yet again: "Mother is coming soon, isn't she? If she misses the boat, then she'll come after us as quickly as she can, won't she — once the Americans have heard her sing?"

"God knows if she'll come at all." Half-truth that is far too close to reality, drawn out of him on a wave of despair. "She's got every right to hate me now..."

Gustave pulls away, confused, and Raoul curses himself for self-indulgent theatrics that have no place in the child's hearing. Both his son and Christine have suffered enough from his own self-loathing; in all the bitter lessons of the last twenty-four hours, hasn't he learnt anything at all?

"Of course Mother doesn't hate you." Gustave frowns up at his father, clearly bemused that such idiocy can exist, and draws himself up for a statement of the obvious. "You're _married_."

Which hurts, just now, on levels of which the owner of that innocently juvenile worldview has as yet no idea. Raoul chokes back an overwhelming desire, as so often before, to grab the boy and shake some sense into him until his teeth rattle; finds himself swallowing instead past a sudden thickness in his throat.

"You're right, Gustave. Your mother never hated anyone... even when they deserved it."

Not even that one who deserved it of her most — whom Raoul himself has hated, and who deserves it in more ways than she knows. Well, she will know now, Raoul tells himself painfully, know the worst of them both. He has told her everything, in that accursed letter. It's the last thing he can do for her. And as so often before, it can only bring her pain.

 _The opera is done; the last notes have been played..._

She will hate him now; for all those childish assurances, he can find no doubt of it. And if she does not, then she should.

~o~

 _—So now you know the truth. I could tell you I was too drunk to know what I was doing, Christine, but that would scarcely be an excuse... and in any case it would not be true. I was drunk enough to be reckless, that was all; mired deep in self-pity, as always, and angry at learning the truth behind 'Phantasma'. If there was any time I should have made a parade of manhood, it was then on that afternoon, when it might have served some purpose at least: I should have raged and stormed and dragged you away from old friends who made it clear we were unwelcome, and a contract that signed us into **his** power._

 _But I was too weak to do anything but drown my sorrows. He thought he could buy us both, body and soul. He was right._

 _If he tries to tell you that I gambled our marriage away to clear my debts, it is not true. I swear it on the memory of all I meant to you once. It was pride, that was all: stupid drunken pride that staked love against your loyalty, and lost._

 _All those tender promises, all those vows to reform — how hollow they must ring to you now. I chanced everything on one last throw to prove that you were my possession and not his, that you would do what I said because your heart was still mine and you were my wife. And I betrayed that bond in the very act of seeking to test it._

 _You know better than any how little was left of our marriage before, and how much I have hurt you in these last few years. You have forgiven me so many times already— but this, I think, is beyond any woman's forgiveness._

 _I gambled you away, Christine. I staked everything that was most sacred on a bet, one more bet I was sure I couldn't lose..._

 _I lose too often. You know that, even if I could never admit it. But it is not because I lost that I have to leave you now, for I would have fought him for you until my last dying breath. It is for the final wrong I did you in ever making the bet at all._

 _If he laid the snare, then I sprang headlong into it. He knows our hearts better than we know them ourselves... perhaps he can make you less unhappy than I. But if I had no right to take that wager, he had still less to propose it._

 _Be free and choose wisely. Forget me if you can. It is all I have left to give you, and I wish it could somehow be more._

 _Yours, in regret always,_

 _Raoul._

* * *

Regret...

In the Hôtel de Chagny the clock ticked, steadily, and the Vicomte set down his pen with a catch in his breath. The ink on the nib was long since dry, and a trailing blot marred the opening words.

He'd thought he was doing the right thing for all of them; behaving honourably at last, back in a world where those old codes had still held sway. He'd truly believed it was all for the best... and he'd thought it would be that easy.


	2. Make an end

**Ch2: Make an end**

Eight days of leave had done little to ease nerves rubbed raw by shellfire and snipers. A burnt coal fell through the grate with a rattle sharp as a rifle-shot, and Raoul had to stifle a sharp, instinctive movement that brought him halfway to his feet. The sleeve of his uniform caught against the decanter tray as he sank back, sending the glasses clattering together, and he was barely in time to field the nearest as it toppled. Thought caught up with reflex a moment later, still flinching in anticipation of the averted crash.

He stared down at the tremor in his hand, unsteady now as if it had been a grenade and not a wine-glass snatched from mid-air. There had been a time, once — a distant lifetime on the far side of this last winter — when violence had been an affront and not a familiar part of the world. A time when it was still something one expected to happen to other people.

* * *

Adrenalin hammering suddenly through his blood as the carriage swerves and lurches, throwing Gustave across the seat and piling them both on top of one another into the corner. There are angry voices from in front, and his first thought is of a road accident: some fool without side-lights, driving too fast.

But they haven't stopped. The near wheel scrapes along something, and through the dirty glass he can see a wall looming far too close, cutting off what little light had been filtering in from the street. He shouts out sharply to the driver and gets no reply, only another lurch and a shuddering halt.

"Papa?" Gustave's voice is small and shaky as if from a much younger child, and Raoul, still struggling to untangle himself, gropes round in the darkness and locates a sleeve and then a hand that grips onto his own painfully tight.

"I'm here. Don't let go—" With his other hand he finds the off-side door handle.

It rotates under his grasp. Tugs open, yanking him out sprawling into a dark alleyway as his fingers slip through Gustave's frantic clutch.

A circle of figures half-glimpsed in the shadows surround him, hands plucking him to his feet ungently from the mud and twisting his arms behind him, others plunging past into the carriage. There is a scream from Gustave and a flurry of curses; the boy cries out again furiously and Raoul jerks against his captors with an oath of his own.

A waft of sickly smell that makes his head spin for a moment; in memory, Christine is moaning from the great bedchamber, whimpering cries of exhaustion and pain, and he is helpless downstairs as her labour stretches on into evening and a second sleepless night. The scent of chloroform clung to the doctor when he came at last to announce that the Vicomte had an heir, and still tainted the room when he was allowed up to see Gustave, and for weeks afterwards it had seemed to haunt the house like the traces of a nightmare. It's an aroma he'd thought long since forgotten. Will never forget.

They are dragging out Gustave now, a small body limp and horribly unmoving, and for Raoul understanding spills over into panic. From the reek of the stuff in the air, they've used enough to stupefy a grown man or even a horse. This isn't a robbery by street Apaches, it's something more... and they could _kill_ the boy like that.

He yells out again in fear and helpless outrage, and another voice crashes over his, in quick, vicious English laden with fury that brings a cringe from the brutes who have him pinned. A glimpse of white and a shape sweeping past him; a crash of glass as the bottle slips and smashes to the ground. A great gust of chloroform that sets them all coughing and the horse plunging nervously in the shafts with a clatter of hoofs in the dark.

"Simonov, you imbecile, do you want us all suffocated on the spot? You were to use that on the Vicomte, moron — when did I ever tell you to use it on the boy?"

A feeble rejoinder—"But boss, the kid bit me"—is swept aside with a snarl, and the figure turns.

Raoul already knows what he will see. The pale mask in the gloom allows of no mistake... but the voice, that hateful voice with its resonant edge of rage, has been all too familiar from the start. Some things are becoming very clear; others more obscure than ever.

He chokes back anger of his own as the mask bends almost timidly over his son. The chloroformed cloth they'd used to overpower him has been pulled hastily from Gustave's face, but in Simonov's grasp he is very white and still — painfully still, for a child whose fidgets have tried Raoul's patience time and again — and Mr Y reaches out to check for a pulse.

Flinches back, as the boy stirs; a moment later Raoul finds his old enemy's eyes blazing directly into his own, above a snarl of victorious fury. The words are for his ears alone, hissed in scornful, intimate French.

"Did you think — did you really think you'd get away with this?"

"That I'd get away with— _you_ dare ask _me_ that?" For an instant, staring round the narrow alley at his captors, Raoul chokes on disbelief. "Have you taken leave completely of what little sanity you ever had? You wanted me out of Coney Island, out of New York, out of your way"—his voice shakes shamefully on that, and he struggles for control, nails biting into his palms—"what the devil do you mean by sending your thugs and enforcers to drag me back?"

"You have something that belongs to me, Vicomte." Icy insinuation. "Something you should never have had. Something you had no right to take. _Gustave_."

The man really is mad. The shock of that understanding leaves Raoul momentarily limp and unresisting in the grip of the burly arms that have him pinned; he feels his captors' grasp slacken, and wills himself not to react. There may be a chance, later.

"That again?" He has no need to feign scorn. "Do you really believe I'd swallow a claim so blatantly false... coming from you?"

It's all part and parcel of the man's nasty little delusions of possession over Christine's life, he knows that, but it's a delusion in horribly poor taste. He'd written it off, earlier, as an attempt to get a rise out of him, taunt him into dangerous folly. But seemingly his enemy has actually convinced himself that Christine's son belongs to him.

"Listen to me. Gustave and I are going home — just as you wanted. Just as you demanded. You've got what you were after; what you've been scheming for all along. You've ripped our lives and our family apart with no more thought than a boy pulling the wings off flies in the window..." His voice betrays him again, and he swallows. Sets his teeth. "You win. I'm not fit to touch the hem of Christine's petticoat, we're agreed on that. But if you ever assumed I'd simply abandon our child to your tender mercies, then you're out of your mind, for there's no reason on earth why I would!"

"Oh, I think there was, Vicomte." From the other man's mouth the title is an insult, smooth and somehow obscene. This is all a game, Raoul knows helplessly; he's being trapped and toyed with, made to pay the price for Paris and all the years since. And when the game is over, when his struggles cease to amuse, then the jaws will close. His enemy will take what he wants and make an end.

He's caught in the madman's noose — and Christine won't be coming to save him now. His own actions have made sure of that...

"I believe we made a bargain." The reminder strikes hard on the heels of that wave of shame, as if the monster can read Raoul's mind. "A dirty commercial little deal. If you won our wager, you were to receive a colossal sum of money. And if you lost, if Christine chose freedom from your whims, chose music, chose _me_ " —the words slide in like knives in the dark, gloating, triumphant—"then you were to leave alone. Or did the meaning of that not penetrate your tiny mind? Alone. On your own. Without her— and without him!"

"You think I care anything for the terms of your damnable bet? Do you think that's why I'm here?" Only it is, isn't it, a small voice whispers in the back of his mind. Hadn't it been loser's remorse that penned that letter and took him out of Christine's life? If Christine had abandoned her song and come with him, if she were nestling close against him now in the carriage taking them to join their ship... would he be steeling himself to admit the truth and undergo the consequences? Or would he yet again be playing the coward's part, as he has done by leaving her with only scribbled words on a page? Is it truly himself he has been punishing, or is it equally her?

He thrusts treacherous whispers back into silence. Too late for self-loathing now. If he's going to lose, then at least he'll go down fighting.

"Are you going to try to play lawyers' games with the wording of a gambling debt?" He manages to achieve derision. Of course the bet had never been meant to cover Gustave, they both know that, but it isn't the point here. It's a matter of how long he can keep his head high before the end. "'Not enforceable in law', isn't that the term? You claim Christine has chosen you; let me tell you how the real world works, then, the world outside your little sanctuary of freaks and murderers. When a man's wife walks out on her marriage, she doesn't get to take the children away from home and family to share in her dishonour — and there's not a court in France or the United States that would ever agree to expose them to the corrupting influence of the seducer and the adulterous wife!"

He reads the retaliation in the moment before it comes. Welcomes it, almost, as an admission and a tiny significant victory. His captors have grown slack; he gets one hand free and up to guard his throat—"at the level of your eyes," the Giry woman mocks in memory—in the last instant.

Only it isn't the lick of the noose around his neck. It's a low blow to the pit of his stomach that sends him doubling over, wheezing. He feels his arms grabbed again from behind, and there's nothing whatsoever he can do to stop the second blow that sinks coldly, scientifically, into his gut.

He hangs there gasping, waiting for more. There are sniggers from behind him, but no-one stirs. And after a while he finds his breath again, his head comes up and he meets the expressionless stare of the mask.

"You can't make black white, you know." He flings it back in defiance. Beyond his enemy, Gustave dangles limply in Simonov's grasp, his face a glimmer in the dusk. "Not with blows. Not even with words. You can't turn the boy into something he's not. I can count nine months; I was there for the wedding, and when he was born. Where were you?"

"And where were you, on the night before that convenient marriage? Not with her, not siring a son — oh, no-one can assure you better of that." He laughs, and the insinuation takes Raoul by the throat in choking disbelief. "Do I need to describe it to you, tell you just what happened? Every sigh, every gasp... ah, but you're a man of the world, Vicomte, you know all about how it's done. And she was a quick pupil, our Christine, urgent and oh, so very responsive—"

A moan has escaped from someone, somewhere. It might have been Gustave. It might have been Raoul himself.

"You— you foul—" He's strangling on his own words, clotted loathing and fury thick in his mouth.

It's a lie. He wants to cry it out, howl it to the world. It's a lie; a thousand times a lie.

But above the harsh sound of his breathing he can hear the other man's answering laughter, light and derisive. "You counted the weeks, did you... loving, trusting husband that you were? Didn't they ever tell you a first child can be overdue? Come now, watching him grow up, so quick, so creative, so unlike your own hidebound caste — it must have occurred to you to question your own part in it. Not least when the little brothers and sisters failed to appear..."

"Best ask that of Christine — if you're planning to set up household with her, that is!" Raoul flings back. He no longer cares what he is saying. Anything will do, any words he can grasp at and hurl like bludgeons to smash the smiling confidence beneath the mask. "It's not every husband who's prepared to be quite so... understanding in his demands!"

And much joy may he have of her then — as much as Raoul has had, in all these years. For a moment, the thought carries only the blind satisfaction of rage.

He gets only a chuckle in response.

"So she wouldn't let you? Well, well, well..." Another chuckle, laden with speculation that sends the heat in Raoul's face flaming from anger to humiliation. "And did it never once sink into that wine-sodden haze you call a mind that your wife might have been comparing your efforts unfavourably with her memories of another man?"

It's more than he can take, on more levels than he can bear to acknowledge. Gustave is stirring with another moan, moving weakly in his captor's clutch as the heavy sleep of the chloroform begins to ebb, but for all his vaunted paternity Raoul is blind to everything save the hatred consuming him. He struggles wildly against the hands that have him pinioned, fighting for freedom like a goaded bull. He manages half a lunge before his tormentor steps forward to strike him again.

This time it's not scientific or controlled. Between blows, as his head rocks back, Raoul glimpses a veil lifted on ten years of darkness, desire and insane rage. The mocking veneer has been split asunder, and the eyes that burn down on him now bear the lashing fire of an avenging angel.

He loses track after a while. Concentrates on riding the pain, trying to keep his feet, trying simply to breathe. He doesn't have enough pride left not to cry out. There will be no rescue, he knows that. Knows that only knife or gun or the choking horror of the noose will put an end to this, if his enemy so chooses. After a while — a few minutes or an eternity, with all dignity gone — he cares only that the end be _soon_.

"Stop it! Stop it — leave him alone!" A child's voice, cutting through the haze. Gustave. It registers dimly.

Another, wordless protest. Then the old shrill name from babyhood: "Papa! _Papa!_ "

Everything stops.

His throat is flayed hoarse, and he's down on his knees despite his resolution; from the smell of the dirt on his clothes, he thinks he's been down lower than that. The thugs have closed in behind him in a tight knot and his arms feel half-wrenched out of their sockets, but there's no-one holding him now. Beyond the looming bulk of the carriage there's a glimpse of sky at the far end of the alley... but there's a frightened, plunging horse between him, Gustave, and any hope of escape. Not to mention the man who has just done his best to reduce him single-handed to a pulp.

He looks up at the mask, closer now. There's a dark splash of mud across it — no longer so pristine, Raoul thinks, and has to fight against weak, incongruous laughter — and it's turned away. Towards Gustave.

For a moment, on the exposed half of the man's face, he can glimpse the most extraordinary expression. If he did not know better, Raoul would have said it was one of yearning and almost of tenderness.

Gustave has struggled back upright. Simonov is still clutching the boy's collar, with a helpless look at his boss, but gingerly, as if afraid his captive will break. And indeed Gustave is already beginning to sag.

"Papa, I feel—"

From the colour of his face it's all too clear what he's feeling. Cursing every wince, Raoul makes it to his feet and discovers that he can move after all.

Taking advantage of the moment's frozen confusion, he reaches Gustave's side just in time, holding the boy's head clear with the ruthless hand of long experience as the retching starts. He's been on far too many endless coach journeys with Gustave, and the child is a very poor traveller.

Big Simonov has shunk back, unthinking. Raoul's lip curls. Easier to smother a small boy into drugged insensibility, evidently, than to cope with the inevitable consequences.

Gustave is shaking under his hands with little sobbing breaths. Raoul locates his handkerchief in the stained wreck of his jacket, cleans the boy's mouth and goes through the familiar motions. But he finds himself smoothing the hair back from his son's damp forehead with an unaccustomed defiant tenderness that is not—entirely—an act.

He is aching all over. He lets himself collapse down to an ungraceful sitting position in the filth of the street, pulling Gustave against his shoulder as the boy retches once more, blindly, then turns and clings to him.

Raoul raises his head again, with an effort. His son's breath is sour against his cheek and his face tear-slimed, but he no longer cares. Mr Y is staring at them both, and the mask cannot wholly hide what Raoul sees as flinching revulsion.

He stares back. The words between them are unspoken.

Is this what you wanted, then? Is this your fantasy of family life — snivelling and mud and a queasy stomach? Because this is what it looks like. This is how it goes. And there's no lie or deception — not even from you — that will make Gustave any the less my son in the eyes of the law... or in his own.

"Gustave—" The other man's voice is shaking a little, and he has extended a hesitant hand. But Gustave cries out and shrinks back, and Raoul takes a brief, savage pleasure in that.

"You've attacked us, injured us, set on your thugs to waylay us — what did you expect, monsieur? Don't you think the boy's been hurt and frightened enough?"

He feels Gustave stiffen. "I'm not frightened, Father."

It's a tiny stubborn voice in his ear, and he holds the boy closer. They are both trembling.

"Neither am I," he whispers back. It's an equally brave lie.

~o~

A rapped command, and Simonov is moving in again to drag them apart. Raoul resists, mutely, uselessly — as if he and Gustave could somehow shield one other against the future to come — and gets a backhander for his pains that rattles the teeth in his head.

Stupid, he thinks muzzily, stupid to manhandle him thus in front of the boy if they hope to gain Gustave's trust. He remembers with a sharp pang Christine's frightened face at her father's grave and a younger self, bright with honour and love still uncompromised, who'd walked unarmed into fire for her sake. Those two people are gone... but it seems that the final participant in that scene has learnt nothing across the years at all.

Gustave's struggles are far from silent. He is kicking and yelling like fury, and in the end it takes reinforcements in the shape of two more of the hired bravos to carry the boy back across the alley without hurting him. Raoul raises his own voice, with an odd catch in his throat. "You can't win him over by making him your prisoner — if you recall!"

"And what have you given him — given either of them — these last ten years that is deserving of loyalty? Debts, self-indulgence and drunken neglect? You've seen what your pitiful allegiance was worth to her tonight"—the words bite deep—"now let the boy make a choice in his turn!"

"I don't understand." Gustave's voice is very small and high in comparison, and it wobbles a little. "Let us go. I want to go home."

He is half-hidden by the bulk of his captors and Raoul, left alone in the mud, can't see the boy's face. But he sees the mask bend down, with a hesitation that is almost a grave courtesy, in front of Gustave where he stands pinioned between two men twice his size.

"Listen to me, Gustave," Mr Y says quietly. He had addressed Raoul with an intimacy that was a calculated insult; he is speaking to the child as if to an adult and an equal. "The last thing I ever wanted was for you to be hurt. I know that has to be hard for you to believe, but I promise you that it was all a mistake — and that those responsible will bitterly regret it."

His tone is sheathed in ice for a moment, and the hapless Simonov, who has fallen back to stand with the rest, shifts uneasily beneath his glare. Then he turns back to Gustave.

"If I ask them to let you go... will you stand quietly and hear me out? I swear to you that I will not lay a finger on one hair of your head if you do not wish it — nor tolerate that anyone else should do so ever again."

Raoul himself being foremost among those who are not to come near the boy, no doubt. "Gustave, no! Don't trust him—"

"Your rôle in this is _silent_ , monsieur." The words lash out like a whip; but there is the faintest croak of a toad, and a mocking echo of amusement from somewhere at his side.

It surprises a crow of laughter out of Gustave. "Wait, was that you? How did you do that?"

At a signal from their master the two men holding him have loosed his arms and stepped back, and now the boy is standing straight and defiant on his own, looking up into the masked face like a small soldier on parade. But for the moment suspicion has been overcome by sheer curiosity.

Mr Y chuckles fondly, as if at a favoured pupil. "It's a mere entertainment, child — a trick of the voice. I'll teach it to you if you would like; it can be the first thing we learn together. Oh, but there will be more for you, so much more: music and marvels, automata as fine-tuned as the ticking of a watch and as mystical as a fakir's illusions, all the miracles of the world in one small space in our home in Coney Island..."

Gustave stiffens, all his wariness returning. "I don't live here. I live at home in France. And I don't live with _you_!"

"But you could." The other man's words are almost too soft for Raoul to hear; it's the honeyed invitation of the snake in the Garden of Eden, the same sweet caress of sound that must have wrapped around Christine, alone in the Opera so long ago. "Wouldn't you like it? You belong here, you know you do. You belong in my world — our world — where beauty moves hidden in the dark and music runs through your veins like fire and ice, burning with ecstasy that is almost pain. Not the daylight world of meaningless rules and of lessons that turn knowledge dry as dust, until all that's left when they've finished with you is a hollow shell that calls itself an aristocrat — and moves like a brainless puppet, dangling on other men's strings!"

There is a silence.

"You hate him, don't you?" Gustave sounds oddly desolate, and older, somehow, than ten. "It's not just because he's a Vicomte. You really do hate my father."

The words hang there like an opening, and Raoul waits for the lie. Waits for his enemy to repeat his obscene claim in the child's hearing.

The moment stretches on; but the lie does not come.

"Let's say that... we hate one another." It's more honesty, from _him_ , than Raoul had been expecting. "It's an old story, and an ugly one. I—"

"You pretended to be my mother's friend so you could tell me lies about all the wonderful things you'd show me in the park. Only it was horrible. And then when I ran away, you came after us next day and stopped our carriage and beat my father in the mud and tried to carry me off again... and all this, all these games, now I know it's all just because you hate him so much. Isn't it?"

"No — Gustave, no!" And in that outcry there is an agony that even Raoul cannot deny. "Forget him — he means nothing. It's you and your mother, you who are special, you whom I need. You'll have everything I can give. Everything I have, all that I am and ever will be. You are the future I thought I would never see, and I'll set the world at your feet—"

He is leaning down over the boy, closer and closer in the grip of the devouring intensity that drives him, until Gustave shrinks back with his hands over his ears, crying out. And still, somehow, still he makes no claim of fatherhood to the boy himself; and it's clear now he will not. For whatever reason, it's something he does not want the boy to hear.

"Stop it!" Gustave is half-sobbing, and he is trembling from head to foot as if about to break and run. "Stop it — I don't like it. I want to go home. I want Mother."

And caught in the morass of his own half-truths, Raoul doesn't know how to explain to his son that he can't have both. Neither of them can, not ever again.

"And Christine wants you, Gustave," Mr Y puts in swiftly. "She sent me to fetch you — after this moron of a Vicomte tried to steal you away."

Raoul tries to struggle to his feet, every bone aching, and finds a choking grip on his collar that lifts him effortlessly and casts him aside.

"Fool"—it's a hiss in his ear—"did you think you could take a child from his loving mother? Was that your revenge on Christine for her choice? Did you think she would come crying after you when her song had ended, begging you to take her back? When she left the stage, she had no thought of you, or of weeping; she was in bliss. And an instant after, with her in my arms, so was I!"

He knew it. Has known it in some fashion all along, even as he was writing that letter. But to hear his own pitiful delusions put into words hurts all over again.

"I'd be more touched by the grieving mother's errand," he manages between set teeth, "if you'd brought it up before and not after your own desires. You'll do as you please — you always have. And heaven help any mere mortals who get in your way."

" _Just as I please?_ " His enemy stoops down on him with a flash of teeth, so close he can glimpse deformity above the snarl, and despite himself he flinches. "That's what you believe — you, who've never wanted for anything in your worthless parasitical life? And supposing it _pleases_ me to put an end to you here and now, supposing the spendthrift Vicomte de Chagny should simply disappear, do you think the police would come looking for me? Do you think anyone would even care?"

"In Paris, no. On Coney Island, yes. Or are you going to kill me in front of the boy? Are you going to show him what you really are?"

The one witness the monster is not prepared to silence — the one whom even Christine may perhaps believe. It's the last card in this game of high stakes they are playing; Raoul flings it down with a confidence that veils despair.

"Gustave—" The boy has shrunk into himself. His eyes cling to Raoul as if he were the only fixed point in the world. One way or the other, Raoul thinks, this may well be the last time he ever sees his son. His stomach twists.

"Gustave, I'll find you. Whatever he does, I'll find you. I'll get word somehow. And if you don't hear — I'm dead, and you'll know why. That's what he is. That's what he does. Remember— and remember who we are."

He looks up grimly, straight at the mask.

"You'll have to arrange a murder, monsieur." His voice is hoarse. "For while I live, I'll never stop coming. And I swear to you that you are not above the law."

Empty words. Empty defiance. "In God's name," he bursts out, "you've got your claws into _her_. Isn't that enough?"

He could have bitten the words back the moment they escaped him; but he is not sure his enemy has even heard. The other man has reached out with an odd, abortive movement towards Gustave, only to freeze as the boy flinches and draws back.

"So you believe it of me, then." It is almost an accusation. Gustave says nothing. His small mute face is answer enough.

"And you would choose _this_ over all that I can give you"—a glance round at the mud and dark—"flee your mother's longing arms and cling to _that_?" The lash of his final words falls across Raoul like a scornful blow; but it is the child who cries out.

"Yesterday, after I was scared, she said I should be sorry for you instead. But I'm not any more. You're evil and I hate you. I hate you!"

There is another, terrible, silence.

"Take him." Mr Y's voice as he stoops over Raoul is low and almost unrecognisable. The hands that reach down to propel him roughly to his feet are relentless in their insistence, but they hold an unsuspected tremor. "Take him and leave for France, now, tonight. There's a tug down at Flannery Quay, the _Mary Ann_ — she'll take you out to join the _Atlantic Queen_ before they pass the harbour limits. Never speak of tonight with the boy, or anyone else. I never want to hear from either of you again. Do you understand?"

"I understand," Raoul says steadily, although it's far from being the truth. His head is reeling, and all he knows for certain is that Gustave is clinging at his side, and that he is alive; they are both alive.

He finds himself leaning against the wall of the alley for support, with cold brick damp beneath his fingers. There is a curt exchange in English going on that evades his tired mind, and dark shapes shoulder past, ignoring him. Someone is backing the carriage out towards the street with jerking competence; Raoul glances up at the box and recognises the hired driver, head crudely bandaged and using the excuse of the nervous, sweating horse to avert his gaze.

Wheels roll past, heavily. Come to a halt. "Get in."

It's not until Gustave tugs on his hand that he realises, from out of the odd surrender of exhaustion, that the command is meant for him.

* * *

The lines on the Vicomte's face were bitter with memory. The hand that had held the wine-glass was clenched on the edge of the desk, and the other pulled again and again at his collar where the blue-grey cloth had grown shiny with wear. He released his grasp on the mahogany and caught the cursed gesture midway; straightened the fingers of that hand also, with a slow, deliberate movement that did not tremble, and thrust it into the breast of his uniform tunic to keep it from straying up again.

General Bonaparte to the life; appropriate, was it not? His face had grown harsher at his own expense. After all, he had won that night — come away with life and child intact, when he'd had every expectation of losing both. Just as he'd been the hero of Christine's rescue in everyone's eyes, stumbling out from beneath the stage arm-in-arm with the missing girl... and what was the truth of physical humiliation and abject inadequacy compared to that?

In the carriage from Coney Island, conscious of the reek from his own soiled clothing, he'd been trembling with reaction throughout the whole of the journey, with Gustave's small hand clutched in his just as Christine's had once been. He'd barely listened to what the child was saying, at first. Some prattle about magical powers...

"But aren't we going to save her? Like you said — we'll keep coming back and we won't give up!"

He'd come to his senses with a jolt at the note of hero-worship in the boy's voice; one that God knew he had done nothing to deserve.

"Gustave, what—"

"He's a magician. Mother said so. And he's got her under his power, hasn't he?"

Raoul flushed dully now, remembering. He'd taken, as ever, the easy way out. Where the man's inexplicable influence over Christine was concerned, after all, it scarcely seemed so very far from the truth.

"Yes"—he'd stumbled over the facile words—"yes, in a way, he has."

"Then she won't be able to come after us." Gustave's voice had risen in panic. "We've got to stop and get her back!"

There had been tears, devastation, betrayal; in the end, with the boy wrapped in his arms, weeping, the bitter confession of truth.

He'd pressed his cheek into the boy's hair, and felt the words quiver through them both. "He's too strong for me, Gustave. And sometimes... sometimes you can't get people back."

They were words that had haunted him throughout the years that followed. And now — now, with all that had just passed — the memory was harder than ever to bear.

He'd written that letter with one desperate, unacknowledged sliver of hope remaining: that the renunciation would reap its own reward. That by setting her free he could tug on her heart and win her all over again.

Huddled in the carriage in a journey by his enemy's charity, forced to face the image of Christine flushed with happiness in another man's embrace— for all his words to the boy, would he have gone back to save her in that moment, even if he could? Or had he begun to nurse a secret, unworthy resentment that his wife should have dared take him at his word?

 _My dearest wife—_

The letter in front of him on the desk was blank, save for the opening words like a mocking echo.

 _My dearest—_


	3. Some unknown grieving woman

**Ch3: Some unknown grieving woman**

Somewhere outside, a motor pulled up. Voices carried faintly through the window. Raoul glanced back up at the clock; down at what he had written, where a long blot straggled across the paper. After a moment he set his pen aside and tore up the unfinished page with unnecessary force.

He dipped the pen again, drew up a fresh sheet, and began to write, jerkily and with hesitation. Above the fireplace the ghost of a portrait looked down, as always. But it was not the shy young face painted by Boldini that was intruding upon his letter, but that of an older woman.

Fresh memories, these, from the near side of the howling swathe of steel that had swept across France. Her face danced between him and the phrase he sought, marked with lines of unhappiness and held high in defiance. He crossed out a word, cursed under his breath, and tried another.

Outside the windows the afternoon sun was ebbing, and long shadows lay across the courtyard from the roofs beyond. Someone coughed lightly in the corridor, in a well-trained preliminary to the rap on the study door.

"Sir?"

Raoul sighed and looked around as the door opened.

"Yes, Valentin?" But he already knew the answer.

"The motor has arrived for the luggage, sir. Shall I send it down?"

As if they were setting off in the style of years ago for a month in the country, with a pile of trunks each for himself and Christine, and a whole case of fresh napkins to be laundered for Gustave... Raoul's hand tightened, unseen, on the desk. Those days were gone; gone in more ways than one.

"You'll find my kit by the door in my room; the two grips Georges packed for me last night, and the sword." Although —uniform or not— he wouldn't be using that for anything short of a dress-parade, Raoul thought bitterly; an arm's-length of patterned steel was no weapon for close quarters in the trenches, let alone the hell of mud and wire that lay between them and the enemy.

"Very good, sir." Old Valentin hesitated a moment, and Raoul took pity on him.

"You can tell them I'll be down in a quarter of an hour — as soon as I've finished this. Send in the post-bag when you're done, would you?"

The old man bowed briefly — or bowed further; he was stooped enough already — and left soft-footed. He'd been pensioned off before the start of the war, and it was hard on him to be pulled back into service. But there were too few men for the running of the house — too few able-bodied men left in France now, with so many at the front — and Georges, who looked after Gustave, could not do it all.

It was a pity for the boy's sake that they'd lost Hänsl, Raoul thought. The young man had been a cheerful and a tireless presence, and he'd got on well with Gustave; taught him scraps of Bavarian German, thick on the tongue as heavy cream, and accompanied his young master to Mass when Raoul could not. Only... 'German' meant something different, these days.

It was hard to picture fresh-faced Hänsl shivering grimly beneath a grey overcoat somewhere in that world of rain and mud. Harder still to picture him as part of the faceless invading masses — or to know that some day, in some enemy trench, they might meet again at the end of a bayonet.

War was madness. Eight days ago, arriving into Paris on this brief respite of leave, his first since the whole thing began, he'd been almost overwhelmed by the normality of all around him: cattle glimpsed in the fields through the train window, spring flowers beneath the trees, life continuing sane and safe and brightly-coloured on the streets, as if two great armies were not straining every sinew to overthrow one another only a little way further north. By the time his cab pulled up outside the house, he'd had the numb sensation that he was gazing through a sheet of glass at a world to which he no longer belonged.

Set back and shuttered behind its courtyard walls, the Hôtel de Chagny had held out the prospect of retreat into an older, more private numbness. But that too had been an illusion.

* * *

Aching shoulders, and a pounding in his temples as if from the thunder of the great guns. His uniform — the cleanest he has left — is travelstained and crumpled, and his head is still swimming a little from the journey. The entrance hall is wide and empty and blessedly dim; he is two hours earlier than expected and Gustave is not there to greet him, only old Valentin, obliged perforce to hide his beaming welcome behind a correct and restrained exterior.

Just as well, Raoul decides. It's easier that way on both of them.

Everything seems a little shabbier, a little smaller than he had remembered it in those long months of war, and all that the idea of 'home' represents to him in that moment is the chance to bathe, to shave, and to snatch a few hours' much-needed sleep before dinner. A dinner over which he will have to face Gustave's guarded silences and closed, unhappy gaze; he has made a poor job of bringing the boy up, Raoul thinks wearily, but he does not know what more he could have done. In these last few years Gustave has withdrawn ever further into his notebooks and his scribbled poetry, as he might once have done into music — before that old unspoken absence that had cut across both their lives. Nor have they seen each other since last summer, with Gustave's letters to Raoul at the front as stilted and infrequent as Raoul's own brief self-censored replies: to describe the truth of the war is impossible, and he would not do it if he could. God send an end to it before his son need learn that reality for himself.

Boys of eighteen are fighting in the English lines. France has not descended that far — yet.

He sighs, stretches tired shoulders, and yields up his kit to be whisked discreetly away by Valentin with a wince of distaste. Just now he does not care if he never sees it again.

"Sir?"

Raoul already has his foot on the first step of the staircase that will lead him up to the attentions of Georges, and a freshly-drawn bath. He turns back with an effort, suppressing a frown. "Yes, what is it?"

"Sir, there is... a caller to see you. In the blue salon."

" _Now?_ " He hasn't been in the house ten minutes; ten minutes of the leave so belatedly granted. His duties to Society can wait. "You will kindly inform this person that I am not at home tonight — do you understand?"

"Sir..." Valentin's face is troubled. They have known each other a long time, man and boy, since Raoul himself was a graceless scamp with a head full of operas and troll-tales. "Sir... this is someone I think you should see. Truly."

He catches an unfamiliar quaver of distress in the old man's voice, and yields. "All right. I trust your judgement. But this had better be important."

Valentin says nothing at all to that. Only stands aside in mute sign that Raoul should precede him to the blue salon, and then steps forward to swing open the tall double doors.

"The Vicomte, madame."

The air in the room is musty and disused, and the little grand piano in the corner has been under Holland covers for years. The egg-shell blue paint of the panelling is dimmed by dust — there have been few enough callers, with Raoul away — and the chairs in all their dainty gilt are ranged back against the walls in severe lines, like girls too petrified by shyness to converse. The woman seated by the window is wearing a plain dress of unrelieved black, and a hat with a short black veil.

Raoul's heart sinks. Some widow; some unknown grieving woman left behind, equally the victim of the shell or trench-fever that had taken her man. He has signed too many interchangeable notes of condolence, and the faces have long since faded into a grimy, bearded blur.

He is already calculating how much he can afford to give her — his debts are a thing of the past, though it's not a subject he cares to dwell, on, but the estates yield less than they once did — as she puts back her veil and rises, turning towards him. The familiarity of the gesture catches at him with an old pain: Christine used to sit just there, used to rise just so...

For a moment, caught up in that memory, he sees her face without really seeing it. A woman of his own age, worn and hardened, with the remnants of great beauty overlaid by the marks of unhappiness—

And then memory and reality jolt into one, with a lurch that hits him in the pit of the stomach as if he had just been turned inside out. He puts out a hand to the wall, instinctively, for support.

"My God—" His heart is hammering wildly, as if with horror or desire, and he can feel the blood draining from his face. " _You._ "

As her expression closes in on itself and the shutters come down, he would give anything in the world to take that exclamation back.

"A pleasure to see you likewise, Vicomte." Christine drops him an ironic little curtsey that raises a further wall between them, and he finds himself stammering.

"Christine, I—" He abandons that attempt. "You, here — how?"

"The _Andromache_ , from New York, a week ago," she says drily, giving him an odd look. "Or did you mean _here,_ profaning the sacred soil of your ancestral home?"

And the cutting edge of that has nothing in it of the woman he has known. It's as if there's another presence in the room with them: an unseen ghostly mark on her that cannot be erased.

She comes towards him.

"I called in, as soon as I reached Paris," she is saying, cool and composed as if there were nothing strange in her arrival — nothing unspoken between them at all. She glances behind him, at the closed doors.

"Valentin always had a soft spot for me, if you remember, and he told me you were expected, so I delayed my journey on the off-chance... I hadn't been sure I'd still find you here. If we'd—" For the first time, she hesitates. "When I left for America, Levancourt was threatening to foreclose."

He doesn't need a reminder of that from anybody. Least of all from her.

The dirty little broker had bought up all the mortgages on the estate at a knockdown rate that was itself an insulting valuation of the Vicomte de Chagny's word. Then he'd begun to turn the screws. To call in every sum Raoul had ever sought to raise. If the letter hadn't come from Phantasma, the Paris house would have been the first thing to go — they'd needed the money from that contract desperately to pay off Levancourt's demands. And Raoul had come back without it.

It was the least of his concerns there on the boat, with Gustave's misery and silent accusations to amplify his own. The _Atlantic Queen_ shouldered steadily through the waves towards a cold and empty horizon, and New York and the shards of his dreams vanished behind him for ever... and in the evenings, with Gustave at last asleep in the cabin that should have held three, he'd cared very little about what would become of them now.

"There's a saying among gamblers: unlucky at love and lucky at play." He watches for the judgement in her eyes. The shadow of distaste. "And I won. On the voyage back, when I no longer gave a silver shekel which way the cards might fall — I won. My wife's parting gift... if you like."

He won a fortune in one wild night, when he'd never meant to stake at all. But young Winston Hathersby had gone out on deck to smoke a cigar and found him by the rail in the dark, staring over the water. He'd all but dragged him in to join the cheerful party in the starboard saloon, without taking No for an answer. And the card-table had offered company when his own thoughts were beyond bearing, and old habits died hard. It was only money, after all. Another of the things that meant very little any more.

All he remembered of that night was young Hathersby's white face as he stared down at the pile of IOUs in front of him; the boy's unsteady voice as he promised the Vicomte payment in full. It had been the last night before England, and he'd seen Hathersby only once more to speak to, with a chauffeured Rolls at the foot of the gangplank waiting to whisk him away.

"Yours too," the young man said in English. A gesture at the automobile, with a tremor behind the bravado. "Fair play, old man — but you'll leave me the use of her for now, I hope?"

He smiled and clapped Raoul on the back, and was gone. A week later, courtesy of Coutts' Bank in London, the Vicomte de Chagny commanded a sum in francs large enough to send Levancourt packing, and redeem his other debts besides. And three months afterwards, still moving in a haze of aching might-have-beens, he learned by chance of a minor country-house scandal across the Channel. A boy who'd blown his brains out on a bankrupt estate.

Paris asked no questions; there were other, meatier scandals to fry. He had nothing to do with it, he tells himself. He had no idea. A gambler is a gambler. He couldn't have known.

In the presence of the Christine he'd once loved, he might have unburdened himself; sought understanding if not absolution. But this collected, cold-edged stranger would offer neither.

"I played. I won." He flings the bald statement down at her feet like a challenge. Watches imagined reproaches rising to her lips as she draws breath to speak. "Oh, it was for the last time, I assure you... but my thanks for your so-kind concern."

For a moment he's not even sure this is happening. He's dreamed so often of opening a door to find her there, dreamed of seeing her rise and smile, dreamed— and woken to despair on a grey morning, and Christine gone. And now, with reality close enough to touch, a hedge of bitter words has sprung up between them. It's as if all those dreams, all those unvoiced betrayals of hope, have been hurled back in his face.

He had no right to hope. He knows that. The knowledge wakes more unreasoning resentment than ever.

He draws a breath. "So Valentin let you in. Told you to come back today. And what of this journey of yours, so casually laid aside? Some errand of _his_ , I make no doubt — what whim of fancy is it that brings you all the way to Paris, yet can wait for a call on a dear old friend? Is he so sure of you then as all that?"

A second or so of absolute silence as she stares up at him.

"He's dead, Raoul." She says it slowly as if to a backward child, with a gesture at her unrelieved black. "He's dead. Phantasma is sold. And I... I came back to our poor suffering France to be of some use, somewhere. To help at the front, if you will aid me now."

Dead. Dead at last, then. With Christine here as his relict, offering herself up as if she is doing them all a favour...

"If you plan to make a nurse of yourself, you can think again," Raoul tells her roughly. "They take women with hospital training, over there — not opera-singers with unsoiled hands and half-baked romantical ideas."

She envisions herself as an angel of mercy out of the picture papers, no doubt, laying cool fingers on some tastefully bandaged young brow. He's seen field hospitals after a battle in all their abbatoir stench; seen the reality of nursing there, and come across a pile of gangrenous limbs stacked behind a makeshift operating theatre when the surgeons were through. Raoul had thought himself hardened, after life in the trenches. He'd folded over and thrown up.

"It's no place for you. You should have stayed in America, stayed away from the war, stayed away"—his voice shakes despite himself—"and paraded your _widowhood_ somewhere else."

"Oh, Raoul..." Her eyes soften briefly, and she holds out her hands, but he draws back and turns away, cursing himself for the childish impulse even as he does so.

"What happened? To him, I mean?" he manages, muffled, after a while. It's a peace-offering, of sorts, and she seems to accept it as such.

"It was an accident." Christine sighs, draws up another chair from the wall and gestures for him to do likewise. She sits, neatly, folding her legs under her with heels together beneath the sombre hem of her skirt. "A simple accident, that was all. A blow to the head; a batten struck him where it fell from above the stage. They say the skull is always thin in that place, and his..."

She hesitates. Raoul remembers against his will the monstrosity he had witnessed in those snarling minutes beyond the lake, half a lifetime ago. A growth on the head could affect a man's brain; he'd wondered, once or twice —in the days when he'd still been young, and in love, and in charity with the world— if that had been the source at root of the Phantom's mania and rage. But if that bulging deformity had eaten likewise into the bone, then a single blow could have done untold damage. A single shrewdly-placed blow... if one had only known...

"Are you so sure it was an accident?" It slips out on the heels of that bitter reflection before he can stop himself, and he sees her flinch. "After all, your beloved maestro was hardly a popular man — even without other aggrieved husbands in the offing."

Had the man even been faithful to her, after all that? Surely, surely, his face could have left him no alternative... but Raoul had glimpsed in that cursed _Don Juan_ the seduction he could wield with his voice, had a sight of the elegant figure he could cut when he chose, with a slick wig and a commanding air, and there were foolish women enough in the world who would fall for the romance of a mask without asking themselves what might lie beneath. He'd somehow won over Madame Giry and her daughter to his service, after all: the very two who, in that last night at the Opera, had once been foremost in seeking to end his reign.

Raoul remembers Meg's clawing nails on the back of his hands, and the wild look in her eyes. He'd seen the way she looked at Christine; he'd put it down to envy of her marriage. The alternative that occurs to him now leaves him more than a little sick.

For a moment he isn't sure whether the renewed wave of fury at his rival is jealousy over Christine or on her behalf. He knows only that if the power to halt that batten had lain within his grasp, he would not have raised one finger to turn it aside.

For the first time, he sees that the ungloved hands lying twisted together in her lap are bare of all ornament. It was his own actions eight years ago that had stripped away the wedding band he had once set so tenderly upon her finger... but none other has taken its place. Not even a mourning ring.

"So he didn't marry you after all?" Any thought of conciliation has flown from his head. "A disciple of free love, no doubt. Or do you wish me to believe that notification of the divorce never reached New York — after all the trouble I took to ensure that you were informed of your liberty at the first possible moment? It's not hard to dissolve a marriage in Paris, you understand, when the foreign papers report one's wife already living openly with another man!"

Not hard at all, save for the endless gossip, the speculations in the evening papers, the helpful friends who wondered if he'd heard the latest from Coney Island... His own hands are clenched rigid on his knees, and he leans forward in his chair.

"'Disgraced Vicomtesse de Chagny appearing nightly on vaudeville stage' — 'Masked lover's seduction of titled lady' — do you know what it was like to endure that, Christine? Do you know what it was like to be pointed out and laughed at as a cuckold on the street; oh, not the usual complaisant husband whose wife knows how to arrange these affairs, but the poor fool who went so far as to divorce her? Can you imagine trying to shield Gustave from the names they called you, from the spectacle of his mother cheapening herself for the holiday crowds at the beck and call of a man without a name?"

"Yes, I sang for him. Yes, I took him to my bed." Christine's voice is shaking on the edge of an icy fury of her own, and her head is held high in defiance. "What choice did I have, alone and penniless in New York? What choice did you ever give me, either of you, when you sank to trading me like some creature from the harem? Which one of us was it who _chose_ to walk out on our marriage, Raoul, which of us decided that he alone was the arbiter of what a woman could and could not forgive? You left me; you took my son and left me a coward's confession in exchange, because you couldn't even face me with what you had done. And then you presume to judge me because I turned to the man who offered me the shelter and security and affection that you had just ripped away?

"No, I didn't refuse him. How could I, when he asked so rarely and so little — was so pathetically grateful for whatever I had? He wanted my voice, and I yielded it to him. That was all he ever demanded of me. The rest... he craved, but would never ask. But when I sang for him, then it was the music that spoke his desires, and I who gave. Gave of my own free will — can you understand that?

"I knew what he had done. I knew how he had begged a promise from me with pleading and then used the certainty of that same pledge to taunt you into betraying our vows with a bet you would lose. I knew he had killed for me and would have killed again. I learned of more darkness in his past than you ever dreamed of, as he wept and sought my pardon. He cared nothing for marriage, or for any man's laws. He was old enough to have sired me, and as helpless in my arms as a nurseling child. He was not safe, or sane, or wholesome — he was a man I barely knew, with whom I'd spent only scant hours face to face. But in his music I could lose myself, and in his eyes I was always glorious, always adored.

"So I lived with his jealousies and his rages and his crawling tears of abjection. I was the harmony to his melodies and the muse to his art; I worked in Phantasma like all the rest, and took my share of the burdens and the hard graft behind the scenes. I gave him all the love I had, and shrank sometimes, a little, from the unreasoning ardour of his. And I held him in my arms like any wife as he died... until there was nothing for me in America, not any more. Then I came home."

The indescribable turmoil in his gut must have shown in his face.

"Oh, not here, Vicomte." A small, sad, wintry smile. "I'm damaged goods; I perfectly understand that. I've no intention of embarrassing us both by trying to force my way back into your life — or your home. Or of performing in Paris with my name plastered all over the playbills, not even with scandal the lifeblood of the stage. I'm not afraid of hard work, and my hands aren't those of a fine lady any more: see."

She gets up suddenly and slips her hand into one of his, with a jolt like a galvanic shock. Her touch is warm and a little damp; engrained courtesy has pulled him to his feet without thinking, and he finds himself standing there wordless with his fingertips brushing across her own. Roughened skin, callous marks, joints thickened by age; he traces them all, and feels the almost imperceptible pressure of her fingers in response, hands reacquainting themselves with each other without any conscious volition.

His grip has tightened, and she draws free a little hastily, with a look of surprise that brings a dull colour to his cheeks. He's exhausted and on edge, and the imputation stings. Just who does she think she is —by her own account— to play the coquette with him?

"Your pardon, Madame." He makes her a tight little bow, and she cries out.

"Oh Raoul, I didn't come here to quarrel with you. All I want is to be of some use when men are dead and dying — and you stand there in your country's uniform and set your stiff pride ahead of everything else. Neither of us matters any more, can't you see that? I mean to go ahead with this with or without your help, even if all I can do is scrub sheets and wash floors; I came to you because you were the first person I could think of in Paris... and because I hoped, however foolishly, that whatever else we had been to one another we could at least remember that we were once friends."

"Friends?" Raoul keeps his hands, with an effort, from clenching at his sides. "Such _friends_ that your face haunted me in Gustave for years, every time I caught sight of him in passing. That my first thought when his voice began to break was not pride at a growing son but gratitude that the new gruff tones were his alone and no longer any echo of yours. This house was full of you for so many years that no effort of mine could strip the ghost of your presence from its walls — and I tried, believe me, I tried!"

He had done this. He had put her there. He destroyed their marriage. The wound of losing her, that he had believed healed to a dull ache, is as raw now in her presence as ever it was.

"I— see," Christine says, cold and very distant. His own words are still hanging in the air, aching and ugly, and from the look on her face Raoul understands that she doesn't see — how could she? She doesn't see at all...

He wants to reach out to her, hurl accusations, crawl for her forgiveness. He wants her in his arms so much that it hurts; wants her out of here where he never need see her again. He wants to fling every drop of his agony back in her face and curse her for his own folly. He would give up his life to set the shield of his body between her and the world, and everything it has done to her and will try to do.

It comes to him suddenly, lucidly, that this is what insanity is like. And if it drives a man to blackmail and murder, and long years waiting for a woman who has chosen elsewhere... then perhaps, at last, he begins to understand his old enemy better than he would wish.

"Christine—" But the plea dies helplessly unspoken, foundered on the reefs of words he cannot find and the final shreds of his pride. She has been another man's concubine. And it's clear enough she wants none of him.

"If that's how you feel," Christine is saying swiftly, clipping the words off short, "then I make no doubt Gustave has been taught the same. It's a thousand pities, is it not, that you chose to take him, if the sight of his mother in him causes you such pain. You knew how much I loved him. All these years I thought of you together, finding some comfort in each other, remembering me a little perhaps. What am I, then, in his eyes? The errant wife? The shameful secret that one does not discuss?"

He can see her swallow. She turns away.

"I tried so hard to let him know he was not forgotten. I wrote to him for so long in the hopes that some day you would let him reply..."

Raoul cuts her off. "I gave him those letters when he was fifteen."

He remembers the yellowed, worn envelopes, creased where he had so often turned them over and over, breathing their dry-leaf scent as if that might tell him what was inside. Remembers the frozen understanding in Gustave's eyes as the boy had looked from his father's face to the faded packet of papers on the breakfast-table between them. "If since then you've had no reply — then that's a matter between the two of you. And of whatever you chose to write."

"You _gave_ him my letters?" Her head comes up swiftly, forgotten tears blazing in her gaze. "You so very kindly gave him my letters, after keeping me in silence for so long? How _dared_ you play such games with people's lives? Just who do you think you are?"

And if he'd ever questioned the wisdom of that long-ago decision, faced with female hysterics there can be no doubt of it now.

"The one man with a duty to shield a suffering child from a correspondence that could only distress him," he flings back at her, hearing the pompous edge in his words; unable to stop. "The one man with the most right in the world: the boy's father!"

Christine stares at him as if at a stranger. Her shoulders are shaking, and after a long minute it dawns on him that the sound she is making is a horrible sobbing laughter.

"That's the one thing you are not," she says softly. Every word is a dagger of bitterness. "So you gave him those letters unopened, then, at least. You were told the truth yourself on Coney Island, but you never believed it, did you? The child you stole like a thief in the night wasn't even of your own getting. Gustave's illegitimate — a bastard — another man's son. And you know very well whose!"

 _And where were you on the night before that marriage? Every sigh, every gasp... she was a quick pupil, our Christine, urgent and so very responsive—_

For a blind, staggering moment the darkness of eight years ago sweeps over him, foul words from the alley taunting in his ear. It's not true. It was never true. It's one more long-forgotten lie.

Only it's Christine — _Christine_ — standing there to say it, eight years older and harder and more hurt; Christine who has never once lied to him in anger or in love. And even with that abyss of betrayal opening up beneath him, he cannot believe in falsehood from her now.

"No." It's not so much a denial as a helpless, hopeless protest. The world is spinning beneath him, and he tries to grasp for something, anything beyond the enormity that blocks his path. "No, I—"

The spindly gilt of his chair has come up to meet him, and someone is loosening his collar. He finds Christine leaning over him, eyes full of unendurable concern, and tries to push her away.

Never once lied to him? If this is true, if she fled to their wedding to cover up the consequences of her lover's bed, then every day of their lives together has been an unspoken lie from the start. He thrusts her off blindly, with a groan.

"Raoul." Anger ebbed, she looks almost as stricken as he. "Raoul, it wasn't the way you're thinking. I never meant for it to happen. I'm sorry— I didn't mean for you to know—"

"Oh, I'm sure you didn't!" He fumbles with collar-buttons, swept by a mounting fury. "And you have no idea what I'm thinking. You never did. You never even thought to ask."

He's on his feet again now, breathing hard, staring down as if to fix every line and every cruelly betraying change in her face into his mind's eye for the future. "I wrote to you, you know. About Gustave. Twice. Only it's clear now those letters never made it, did they? You never thought to ask yourself that. You never thought to wonder why I wouldn't care — because you had your dirty little secret and your precious lover to keep you shut away. Those letters that went to Phantasma, do you think he kept them in linen, as I did? Do you think he saved them for you to read later, when the boy was grown? I think we both know better than that. They went straight back to sender — by way of the fireplace!"

But Christine, sobbing, has her hands over her ears.

"Does he have a name?" He is twisting the blade in his own breast even as he turns it in hers, but something within him is broken, and the words spill out like tearing knives. "Am I to know who fathered my son? Or did you whisper "Mr Y' across the pillow, when you woke in the dark watches of the night?"

Her head comes up at that, held high in defiance as she backs away. The look on her face is something he'll never forget; never be able to remember, now, any other way.

"Yes, he had a name," Christine says softly. She turns on her heel, and walks to the door. "But you'll never know it. Goodbye, Raoul. I doubt we'll meet again."

The door opens, and she is gone. A murmur of voices outside, and the sound of the front door. Raoul cannot move.

It seems like hours later that he stumbles into his study and buries his head in his hands. Tears come, and a long wave of despair.

~o~

"Father?"

It's later still that he hears Gustave's voice behind him. Raoul raises a ravaged face from his desk and turns.

The boy hesitating in the doorway has grown visibly older in the months since the start of the war, the line of chin and cheek becoming clear-cut, more adult, a foreshadowing of the man he will some day be. The dreamy poet's eyes are his mother's, troubled now and dark in concern; the brows so often drawn down in sullen retreat are thicker and darker, but unmistakably hers. It's a fine-boned face with the delicate beauty of a young Perseus or Apollo, but the nose is a little too large, the jaw a little too strong ever to be mistaken for those of a girl.

They have not seen each other since the summer. Raoul should have been there to meet him at the door, to enquire after his schoolbooks and return a warm embrace. Instead he finds himself scanning Gustave's features as if searching for a stranger. The sudden moods, the withdrawal of these last few years — he understands it all now with a sudden bitter pain.

The boy knows. Of course he knows. He's spent years living with the shadow of that monstrous taint and the stain across his name... ever since Raoul had been fool enough to pass over those accursed letters which Christine — damn her — had sent to a ten-year-old child.

Oh God, Christine... Something of what he was feeling must have shown in his face, for Gustave comes quickly across the room and drops to one knee beside his chair, looking up with a swift frown of distress. "What is it? Are you all right?"

"She came back." It's torn out of Raoul like a groan from the heart as the boy's arms come round him. His own hold tightens around the slim young shoulders in response. Gustave's face is buried in his tunic-front, and tears can fall unseen against the boy's rough-tumbled hair. "She came back. After all these years your mother came back — and she's gone. I let her go."

In this moment it's all that matters; not hard words, not betrayals, not even the imposter's blood in the son he loves... and has loved more fiercely because she was not here. She had come back, beyond all hope and all expectation. And in the petty sting of his wounded pride he had stood there and watched her walk away.

Gustave has pulled back a little, his eyes searching Raoul's gaze. Raoul nods, slowly.

They both know, now. But they will never, ever speak of it, not even between themselves. Raoul gathers his son closer; hears him whisper "Father" again, and brushes away dampness along the boy's cheek.

* * *

The Vicomte's pen had halted once more. On the page, the word "Gustave" stood out thick and black where ink, freshly dipped, had been left to dry.

He could still feel the weight of the boy's head on his breast from that first night of his leave, when they had sat here together for long unspoken hours; but they had made their goodbyes this morning, before Gustave left for his lessons. It was easier that way.

The house was full of memories just now, and most of them — all of them — hurt. Perhaps war was easier after all, Raoul thought grimly. The final, unfinished letter lay open before him. He dipped his nib back into the inkwell, eased his collar automatically, and began to write without hesitation or rereading, barely even looking at the words as they came. On the last line he paused briefly, as if a wheel had come full circle. Signed, blotted, sealed the envelope, and wrote a few covering lines on another sheet to complete the packet.

A brief discreet knock on the door was Valentin. Raoul stood up, stretched, and sighed.

"Is it time? All right, I'm coming... Here, these are for the post. My regards to the Vicomte Gustave, and I'll see him again in a few months — God willing." The other paper with its enclosure was still in his hand. He held it out quietly. "Valentin, if... if by any chance I should happen not to return, I want you to give him this."

Their eyes met, acknowledging the possibility. For a moment the old man seemed about to speak; Raoul gave him a tiny shake of the head, managing a smile. "Just give it to him. He'll understand."

A few minutes later the room, with all its ghosts, was empty. A distant door closed, and the Vicomte de Chagny was gone.


	4. Mort pour la France

**Ch 4: _Mort pour la France_**

Paris in the autumn was as busy as ever. The leaves on the trees were dusty as the streets and beginning to turn brown, and the sun through the windows of the tramcar struck hot on Christine's cheek as it had not done all summer — or perhaps, she thought, adjusting her blue uniform cloak, perhaps it had, and she had not been in any condition to notice it.

She descended from the tram at the corner of the boulevard Mont-St-Fleury with a nod to the lady conductress — the war had changed many things — and began to walk rather slowly towards the little café further down. In the pocket of her dress, behind the red cross sewn at her breast, lay the letter that had brought her here, dragging at her steps like a weight from which she had believed herself cut free. She was tired: too tired to feel anything, she told herself, with a bone-deep weariness born of long nights of strain and endless exhausting days of labour over shattered bodies in improvised wards behind the lines.

There was nothing romantic in nursing; Raoul had been right — poor Raoul! But that reflex jolt of memory was nothing more than a dull echo now.

It was a week ago that the news had reached her, on a grey morning when she had been numbed to all else but the aching need for sleep. For two days and nights they'd been dealing with a rush of casualties from the clearing-stations, and there had been little time for more than a snatched doze for anyone. She'd stood there in the matron's office, stupid with fatigue, smoothing out the crumpled sheet of paper over and over again before she even registered that it was a letter from her son... or the meaning of that brief formal note.

 _Madame, I write to inform you that my father, Raoul de Chagny, has been reported killed in action—_

A man had died under her hands not half an hour before, a burly Picard brought in with half his jaw ripped away. She'd stared down at those words from Gustave and seen just one more death in a long interminable parade.

"Bad news, I suppose?" Madame Gualtier behind the matron's desk had been brusque but sympathetic; she'd seen it all before. "I can let you have a couple of days' leave, but with this latest push we're run off our feet—"

"There's no rush, Madame," Christine had said quietly. The postmark had been ten days old. "Whenever it's convenient."

She'd gone back to her quarters with the letter clasped in her hand and fallen asleep for a few blessed hours, and woken to find it still there, in the half-waking dream that her life had become. _Poor Raoul_ , she had thought briefly, when she remembered. And then she had returned to the work where, for the moment, she was most desperately needed, and when she remembered again it had been with a little less of a jolt each time.

Now that Madame Gualtier could spare her, she had her promised leave of absence: two days 'permission' in which to return to Paris and attend to the other half of Gustave's brief message. To this meeting with the son she had lost eight years ago, who had written that letter in a stranger's hand, and who had been brought up, no doubt, to believe that she had left him and their life of debt to live with a rich man in America...

Without knowing it, she had begun to walk even slower. Down a side-street she could hear children's voices raised in shrill excitement, and the sound of simulated gunfire. Christine glanced round sharply and caught sight of a miniature stretcher-party advancing, the chief casualty wriggling with vast importance under his blanket and borne up by two acolytes in improvised uniform. A little girl with a blue tablecloth tied round her shoulders over her pinafore was bending anxiously over him, a handkerchief tucked into the back of her hat in imitation of a nurse's veil.

She looked up, caught sight of Christine in her white dress and cap, and gave her a beaming smile. For the child's sake Christine forced a smile in return, and quickened her step to leave the street-games behind.

 _Died for his country_... It was the official phrase of condolence. The formula deployed by all the newspapers to honour the glorious dead. Perhaps, she thought, among men of Raoul's caste it might even have been true. Easier in any case to talk of a swift noble sacrifice than the reality of ruined flesh and rotting wounds, and all the indignities wrought by swift-moving metal when it smashed a man's life from his bones. Easier not to think of a body one had known in all its vulnerable intimacy: the dusting of firm-springing hairs along her husband's forearm as he rolled up shirtsleeves in the heat, the little hollow place at the back of his neck as he bent to sponge his shoulders, the faded scar from childhood above his knee... She shut those memories away as she had done with the years at Coney Island. It was over. Done with, for good or for ill. She would not remember the boy she had played with, or the young man who'd set love above life itself... or the husband she'd failed to save, who'd gambled away everything he valued until, in the end, he'd gambled her affections away. She would remember only that she had a son — a son of two fathers, a son of neither — and that in a few minutes' time she would be face to face with him once more.

The tables outside the café were crowded, and Christine's heart sank. She was not even sure she would know Gustave when she saw him. Closer now, and closer; what would she do if he was not there? But her feet carried her inexorably on until at last she was hesitating at the edge of the awning, wondering what she should say. Then a young man in black gloves rose to his feet and came towards her, and she saw the crepe mourning band on his sleeve and knew before ever he spoke.

"Madame." Gustave was taking her hand a little awkwardly, with a boy's stiff bow. "Mother... There's a back room inside; shall we go in?"

So they were to have a degree of privacy together, at least. She was grateful for that.

Christine followed in his wake as he threaded a way for them through the tables with a neat dexterity she remembered in him as a child. A quick word to the proprietress, majestic of bosom and demeanour behind her counter indoors, and they were ushered into a little back-parlour where the dining-table lay awaiting the cloth and silverware of the evening, and an array of plates was piled neatly on the buffet by the wall. The woman lingered until Gustave slipped a few coins from his pocket into an expectant hand; then she closed the door, not without a parting glance bright with curiosity.

There was a moment of strained silence. Since Gustave showed no signs of drawing out a chair for her, Christine took one herself, stripping off her gloves and laying them down on the table with composure. The boy, flushing, did the same.

He was slim and dark, with a pallor that bore no hint of Raoul's warm blood from the Midi, and his hair, trimmed short and slicked down firmly for this meeting, gave evidence of an untamable wave that vividly echoed her own. He had been a beautiful child; he would turn heads as a man, she thought, searching with a pang in those half-formed features for traces of ugliness made right. For the strong line of temple and ear no longer marred, and a broad brow unmasked and unmarked by arrogance.

The resemblance to herself was very strong. So strong that it must at times have seemed hard to bear.

"I got your telegram, Mother." The quick colour had ebbed in his face, leaving his strained pallor more obvious than ever. He would be alone in that house now as never before — alone with his grief and the weight of the title and all it entailed, too old to be comforted as a child and too young to take on the manhood suddenly thrust upon him. Christine laid her hand impulsively over his, and felt him tense up as if to pull away. She held on.

"I'm sorry. I would have wired sooner, but your letter took days to find me, and then I had no time to compose a reply." She released his hand. He had set his hat down on the table, and rather than meet his eyes she found herself studying the black band it bore.

"And in any case..." She drew breath; came out with it resolutely anyway. "There would have been no place for me at that funeral."

A divorced wife did not make a show of mourning in the family chapel, in front of the empty coffin of a man lost amid the mud and shells of Champagne far away. In due course there would be another plaque on the wall, with her own name — as _beloved wife and mother_ — discreetly omitted from the record of that long line. And to the de Chagny family and all their acquaintance it would be as if she had never existed at all.

Gustave said nothing. But they both knew it was true.

"They said..." He was looking down at his hands on the table. There was an ink-stain across one finger. It made him seem more of a schoolboy than ever. "They said... he was shot in that first advance. When you were in the hospital, you didn't— I don't suppose you—"

"I heard nothing. Nothing at all." Christine's voice tightened. "No tales of heroism from wounded comrades, no last-minute reconciliation at the dying man's pillow — that would be too much of a coincidence even for some tale in the illustrated papers. Reality isn't that convenient, Gustave. Hundreds of men passed through my hands in that hospital, and not one of them knew me, or spoke any word of your father."

It had slipped out through old habit before she knew what she was saying. Now it lay there in the air between them in mute accusation.

"Only he wasn't, was he?" Gustave's words were quiet, but very deliberate. "Thanks to you."

He looked up, his dark gaze level and for the first time shockingly self-possessed. "The law is very convenient, isn't it? He acknowledged me at birth; that made me his heir beyond any possibility of disinheritance, whatever question might later arise. You'd duped him into giving his name to your byblow, which meant you'd bestowed me safely, whatever might happen to you if and when the truth should come out. The truth: that I'm the son of a moment's weakness with a monster to whom I owe nothing at all!"

If he meant to hurt her, he had succeeded. Tears stung the back of her throat, sudden, unwanted. "Is that what he told you about me? Is that how he spoke of me, then, for all these years?"

"Spoke of you?" Her son's eyes beneath their dark smudged brows were steady on hers. But they were unmoving and a little too bright. "Oh no, Mother, it was your own letters that told me that. We never spoke of you. We never spoke of you — even when your absence hurt the most."

He stood up abruptly, using his young height to tower over her, and the ghost of anger swirled about his shoulders like a black cloak.

"Do you have any idea what it was like to learn the meaning of the word 'adulteress' at the unforgiving hands of your schoolfellows, at the age of ten? To come home in tears to a silent house, and the helpless pain of a father who himself faced the same sneers, day in, day out? I was eleven years old before I discovered that other people's newspapers didn't have holes in where stories of your exploits had been cut out — and saw for the first time what he'd tried to shield me from.

"You know, I was foolish enough to believe in ghosts and magic, and all the stories you used to tell. I used to dream that you were under an enchantment, imprisoned behind the sorcerer's walls, and that if only a shining prince could ride across the ocean and awaken your heart, you'd remember all about us and come back and be my mother again."

His young face was twisted in mockery at his own folly, and without thinking Christine reached up to him as if to comfort that long-lost child. "Oh, Gustave..."

But he drew back from her in a gesture that was all Raoul, and turned aside.

"Only my father was no shining prince." The words were a whispered acknowledgement. "He was a drowning man struggling for both our sakes to keep his head above the water... and I didn't understand why he could not or would not fight to save you. There'd be a little draught like a hand along my cheek when no-one was by, or a whisk of skirts up ahead in an empty corridor, and I was sure it was a sign your spirit was out there somewhere, trying to come home."

He dropped back heavily into his chair, head bent as if studying the grain of the table in front of him, like a schoolboy who will not meet his teacher's eye. His voice was very low.

"Your suite of rooms was shut up and no-one ever went inside. Only... sometimes, when the house was quiet and everyone was asleep, I would lie awake and think I heard footsteps moving there behind that locked door, and the sound of weeping, very low and far away. I was a child missing his mother. I knew for certain it was you." One finger was tracing a pattern on the table-top, over and over again. "It wasn't until later on, when I was older, that it dawned on me who it was I'd really heard... In the spring when I was twelve, I took the key from his desk drawer. I'd been daring myself to do it for a long time, but I still remember the feeling of guilt as I crept upstairs, and the weight of it burning a hole in my jacket pocket.

"I don't know what I thought I'd find in there; I was too old by then to believe I'd somehow be able to reach you in any way, but all the same I had to know. I couldn't go on pretending that you'd never existed — that I'd never watched you dressing your hair for parties in front of the mirror, or curled up with you on the day-bed to read stories or tell tales. So I turned the key in the lock.

"I thought it would creak and groan, but I used both hands and it went round easily, as if you'd never been away. I crept inside before anyone could come past and catch me, ashamed of myself but knowing I couldn't turn back. I'd spent too long nerving myself up to do this. Father was busy with callers for once downstairs, and it might be ages before I got such a good chance again. I shut the door behind me, and stood there with my back to it, hardly able to breathe.

"Nothing had changed. It was like waking up in a memory I thought I'd forgotten, as if at any minute I might turn my head and you'd be there, reaching down to set straight the tumbled brush on the dressing-table or the scarf abandoned across the back of a chair... Only everything was faded and old, and there were dust-motes dancing in the sunlight through the open shutters. Your portrait was there, the one that used to hang downstairs. Father never spoke about it, and I'd never known where it had gone; but it was shut away in your rooms, as beautiful as ever, gazing down from the wall with that little dawning smile like a Madonna in a shrine."

He hesitated. "You could see where he'd tried to keep the room clean, with clumsy care. And... and there were fresh flowers in the vase beside your bed."

 _Oh God, Raoul..._ Something tightened inside her, half-anger, half-pain, in a place she'd thought long since numb. She hadn't asked for this; hadn't wanted it... But she choked back that moment of hurt — not for her own sake, but for Gustave's; the boy had broken off, but he looked haunted — and said only, quietly, "Go on."

"I— I suppose I was in a sort of daze. Everything was so quiet and still, but there was a feeling of someone looking over my shoulder the whole time, and it wasn't just that I knew I shouldn't be in there. I wandered round picking things up and putting them down again, trying not to leave any trace, with a whispering unhappiness somewhere just out of earshot in the corners of the room. When I pulled open your handkerchief drawer there was the faintest lingering hint of lavender, and I wondered"—he swallowed—"I wondered if your clothes were still in the wardrobe.

"I used to hide in there, when I was small. Do you remember? I used to bury my face in your dresses hanging there, and pull the skirts about my shoulders, and pretend you couldn't see me. And the scent of it would be all round me like a drifting embrace, great wafts of lavender, and of silk, and of you. It was dark, and safe... until you came to reach in and catch me, a little boy squealing and laughing beneath his mother's arm. I'd almost forgotten...

"Only now I was the one outside, alone in your bedroom, and you were gone, and whatever was left in there would only be an empty husk of what I was looking for — what I couldn't find. It was stupid. I told myself that. But like a sleepwalker I still went forwards, remembering... reaching out to run my hands through those long-forgotten gowns as the wardrobe door swang back and the sunlight came streaming in."

He shivered, sharply. "Only there are other things that find a home shut away in the dust and dark. The cloth clung and fell away beneath my grasp like the winding sheet from a corpse, writhing with worms, and I screamed. A great cloud of moths blundered up blindly from the ruin, fluttering and clinging, and to a twelve-year-old child it was as if you'd been eaten up and come back as a swarm of hungry ghosts. I beat at them with my hands and they kept crawling and quivering on my jacket, and they wouldn't come off. And I couldn't stop screaming. Not until Father came."

For a moment, she too could see it: the barren exquisite room, stale with the air of a faded past, the half-grown boy strung up to hysteria-pitch — and the tall figure framed in the doorway. She bit her lip, guessing at the shadow in Gustave's face.

"Did he... punish you?"

"What? _No!_ " Her son's head jerked up again with an unfeigned shock that let her know just how very wide of the mark she had been. "He took back the key and got me out of there and calmed down. He must have seen I was crying like some child still in short-coats, but he never brought it up against me afterwards, or breathed a word of blame. Not even that night, when I dreamed of you stumbling dead from that wardrobe in a decayed dress, and woke up screaming again."

His eyes were dark with something that might have been shame or defiance, and she could find no words. She put out a hand; drew back when he looked at her without moving.

"My father wrapped me in a blanket," Gustave said steadily, "and sat with me all night in front of the study fire, held in his arms so that he could keep the dreams away. No man should have to play such a part, not for a growing boy — but he nursed me through those hours as close as any mother, and said in the morning only that the fault was his, and that it should never have happened. After breakfast, by silent assent, we stripped your rooms bare and made a great bonfire in the courtyard to burn it all. No more memories. No more shrines. No more reaching out after a time that was gone.

"He had to be mother and father to me both for all those years, as best as he knew how. You think he spoke ill of you; how could he, when he never spoke of you at all? And then you dare try to tell me I was not his son, when I was all he had and he was all I had — and in our lives there was an echoing agony of silence between us where you should have been!"

And yet his very words betrayed him, Christine thought, hurting for her son and his steadfast allegiance. Stubbornness, perhaps, he had learnt from the Vicomte. But that winged gift of phrase was one she knew all too well, and it had not come to him from Raoul...

"Were there no... stepmothers, then, to fill that place for you in all those years?" she said instead, with a certain hesitation, and saw his face harden against her into sudden, cynical adulthood.

"Oh, really, Mother, fishing for scandal? Don't you think that's unworthy, even for you? Now, would it be the state of my welfare as a boy that concerns you, I wonder... or that of my father's bed?"

The ugly words drove colour up into her cheeks with a truth she had not wanted to acknowledge, even to herself, and she caught her breath, letting outrage fuel anger. " _Gustave—_ "

"No, he wasn't bringing women home, if that's what you want to know. As for the rest... that's none of my business. Or yours — least of all yours!"

And that was the outside of enough.

"Listen to me, Gustave. You will not speak to me that way, or to any woman, do you hear? None of this was of my choosing; none of it was by my desire. Raoul took you with him because the law gave him the right, and your father — your true father, the man you hate but whose blood you bear — came after you because he wished to please me. But he was angry, and unskilled with children, and it all went wrong... I never wanted you frightened or injured, and I never wanted Raoul harmed as he was, whatever he may have tried to make you believe. I didn't feel hate for him and it was not I who decided to abandon our marriage. No-one told me that if I sang one song as I was contracted to do, then my husband would take it into his head to rip my life apart, and claim it was all for the best and done for my sake. No-one asked me if I wanted to be handed off to another man and left behind to make a life for myself as best I could, as a fallen woman in America.

"Those years I spent on Coney Island were one part heaven and one part hell, and the more of the one, the more of the other. I didn't ask for any of it. For the sin of your birth you have the right to judge me if you wish, but for nothing else. And until the day that you too have fallen in love, my son, you will kindly keep your moralising to yourself!"

The icy tone in that last whiplash phrase was one that she had learned in Phantasma; she saw the boy's face grow pale then flush up in response, and knew a bitter pang for the vanished years that had made strangers of them both.

"And if I do get a girl," Gustave said softly, in a voice that shook, "have you asked yourself what kind of heritage I have to offer her? A name to which I have no right. A title I bear by fraud. And a blood-taint of madness and horror. Will our daughters be grotesques, do you think? Will sons of my getting fall prey to murderous rage? What kind of monster am I, Mother? How can I ask any woman to live with the chance of that?"

It was the whisper of unspoken sleepless nights, of a boy facing new fears on the verge of manhood, and anger ebbed as quickly as it had come. And hadn't she faced that same shamefaced dread every time she had yielded, these past few years? Gustave's birth had cost her dearly enough; but if she had set their happiness above her art, if she had had the courage to conceive a child with Raoul, at least it would not have brought with it a fresh chance of horrors masked or overt growing within her womb...

The image rose up before her suddenly of the children they might have known — curly-headed daughters, sturdy laughing boys — and shared pain drew a cry from her straight from the heart. "Oh, my dear—"

She held out her arms on impulse; a moment later she had the tall young strength of him wrapped tightly within her embrace.

Her son. Her only son. Her Gustave.

"Forgive me, Mother — I never meant to bring you here to quarrel—" It was murmured into her shoulder in a swift boyish yielding that was all Raoul, and her eyes stung with new memories unseen.

He had slipped off his chair to kneel beside her; she ran a hand gently down his cheek and set him aside so she could rise to her feet, waiting for him to do likewise.

"You said you had a letter for me, I think?" She tried for a businesslike tone, and saw him swallow and do likewise.

"My father. He left me a note with some... some personal words, and this."

He drew out a sealed envelope from within his jacket, a little crumpled, and held it out. She could see a single word scrawled across the front, hasty and a little irregular. Nothing else. Just _Christine_.

She'd expected it, of course. It was the errand that had prompted the brief exchange of cables between them to make this appointment, in response to those few curt words at the end of the notification Gustave had sent: _a letter to be given directly into your hand at his request_...

She'd come with reluctance, but a certain need to know. But now that Raoul's words were within reach, a wave of rejection rose in the back of her throat.

What use — what earthly use could it be? Hadn't they done each other enough harm, and hurt each other enough? And wasn't it just like Raoul, after all, to insist on having the last word from beyond the grave?

If it had not been Gustave standing there, she might have swung round abruptly and walked out, leaving the unwanted legacy for the messenger to do with as he would. Instead, she took the envelope from his outstretched hand with a shrinking she tried not to betray, and turned away to the window, as if to find a better light.

There was a shabby grey courtyard beyond, with linen flapping on a line. Christine gazed out over it, unseeing, while her fingers broke open the flap and pulled out the page within. There had been another letter, once, left behind at Phantasma, and nothing she had thought she'd known had ever been the same again.

 _My dearest wife—_

She'd burnt it. It hadn't helped. There were words one could not un-read, or forget.

 _He thought he could buy us both, body and soul. He was right._

Oh Raoul, you fool, why did you do it? Why did you ever do it?

With something like a sob she unfolded the page, and turned it over.

~o~

 _My dearest—_

 _Perhaps you will never read these words. I am selfish enough to hope not. I want to believe that there is still a chance to make things right. But if you are reading them then I will never see you again... and perhaps that is just as well._

 _There were times, too many times, when I lashed out to hurt you in order to ease my own pain, and that is an ugly thing to learn of oneself and have to admit. But it was only ever an impulse born of the moment and as swiftly gone. I never wished that your life should be damaged and twisted with mine as it has been._

 _For a long time I blamed it all on_ _ **him**_ _, but that was not true, was it? For me it has always been only you, but for you it was harder. He hurt you so much I could never understand how he claimed to love you, until I came to do the same..._

 _I see you in every young couple on the street, all those lovers who stroll as we did with her head upon his shoulder, and as they pass I feel the empty ghost within my arm where his entwines around her waist. That stone where you stumbled the first time we walked together — I see it every time I cross the street at that spot, and I think of you. I see you in every turn of the head and every singing line of poetry from your son, Gustave. In my life everything reminds me of you, and yet you are nowhere in it... and perhaps that makes it no very great loss, after all._

 _There is no glory in death in this war. I know your courage will have taken you to the front lines whatever I might say; if you are reading this, then by now you will know. Will have seen sights no woman should see and no man should be asked to witness. And yet it makes the conflicts in our lives seem so small in comparison._

 _If we both come through this, then we will be different people. I pray to God that we do, that these words I write now will be burnt and that we can start again. But if not... I don't want to grieve you, Christine. Just let me love you a little. Now, when it makes no difference._

 _Yours, in regret,_

 _Always._

 _Raoul_

~o~

Christine stared down at the final words, feeling something contract painfully within her. Her eyes swam for a moment in hot protest.

"He had no _right_ —" The cry was torn out of her unthinking. "No right—"

He had no right to make her care like this. No right to make it hurt all over again, when she had thought herself numb. No right to go away and leave her—

Somehow the paper had crumpled in her hands. She found herself straightening it out with infinite pains, smoothing each crease as she had when coaxing away a frown. But her touch could not reach him; not now, not ever.

"What fools we were, the two of us." She shut her eyes; felt the silent tears spill over. "Romantic idiots — oh God, _Raoul_..."

Gustave was at her elbow, a warm presence of soap and pomade and dusty black that made her heart ache within her all over again. She looked up to find her son watching her across all the years that they had lost, with the eyes of a kind, concerned stranger. For a moment she had never felt more desperately alone.

She managed a smile of reassurance, more for Raoul's memory than for Gustave. He was painfully young, and himself grieving; his lip trembled a little. "Oh, Mother"—it was a sudden outburst—"what are we to do?"

The past was an aching void, and there was nothing to be done. Another tear slid downwards. She paid it no heed.

The war had taken Raoul. It was taking the flower of France. Boys barely a year older than Gustave were being called prematurely to the colours; if the attacks failed again and again, if the Germans clung on until next summer, it would be her son, too, marching off to the training camps. Marching off to be made ready for the merciless machine of mud and disease and suffering...

Raoul was free of that, at least, she told herself, clutching for comfort. Nothing could hurt him now; neither fear nor hunger nor despair. He was free of the war, and of her, and all the dark shadow of the years between.

Only he had not wanted to die. That knowledge broke over her again in a fresh helpless wave. He had clung desperately to the hope of life and that fragile thread between them in which she had no longer believed. The one that plucked now at her heart until she could not bear it.

But it must be borne. Christine located her handkerchief; dried her face defiantly, and mopped at her nose like any schoolgirl. Gustave put an awkward arm around her, and she let her head rest on his shoulder, more weary than she could ever express.

He had his own gift, she remembered. Not music, but one as winged and potent, that could make beauty out of folly and evil and pain.

"We carry on." It came out muffled, almost whispered against his coat, and his other arm came to hold her close. "There's nothing else to do. And whatever happens, Gustave — whatever becomes of either of us — you must keep on writing. Some day I'll need you to find the words for me. For the war; for everything. Let there be something worth having out of all this, something that will live on. It's what your father would have wanted."

Both of them, she thought, the words catching unspoken in her throat. They would have wanted it for him... both of them.


End file.
